> the total extermination aspect in particular is a novel aspect of farming culture

Perhaps there wasn't a change in culture, but rather that farmer tribes were able to grow bigger? A hunter-gatherer tribe could be size-limited according to the available resources. Likely 2 neighbouring tribes would therefore be roughly the same size. Which would make it hard for a tribe to fully exterminate other tribes. Would you send all your fighters to take on another tribe, with the risk of none of them coming back, leaving you defenseless? What if a dangerous animal walks into camp while all fighters are away?

If a farming tribe could sustain double population, that would mean double the amount of fighters, thus it would reduce the risk greatly of sending out a large group of fighters.

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uxhacker a day ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, as I understand it the population growth of the arable community is far faster than the hunter gatherers. This is because hunter gatherers often did not wean children off breast milk until they were 5, whilst arable farmers breast fed there children only up to 1 year.

Breastfeeding is a natural contraceptive.

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asdff 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Farms yield more food than forest of course as well. But what is more, the whole math of children changes between hunter gatherers and farmers. For hunter gatherers, more mouths in the tribe are a liability. Everything has now gotten harder. What few game species and edible plants in the area have not changed in number and are being demanded further.

For agriculture societies however, the planting is easy. Harvest and processing is the challenge. Tendency is to therefore overplant and struggle to harvest it all unless some crop failure or other catastrophe befalls. This keeps you in a pattern to avoid famine but also incentivizing constant population increase to handle harvest.

Now take it a step further and what might you do in times of low food output with excess males? Might be a good time for a war, spend down some of those males and maybe return some more arable land to alleviate food pressure in the remaining population. Maybe the agriculture chiefs of old didn't think in these terms so explicitly, but they are bound by these incentives and history seems to support this sort of model playing out over time.

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christophilus 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Having got my wife pregnant while she was still nursing our 1 year old, I think the contraceptive nature of the nursing period is overstated.

	▲	octopoc 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think the contraceptive affect is stronger if the mother nurses on demand, i.e. through the night
	▲	9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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wvbdmp 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why?!

	▲	uxhacker 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Food. In Arable societies children could be weened onto porridge or milk from cows. Food that hunter gatherers survived on is less digestible for babies. So you would get higher population growth in Arable societies but not necessarily healthier.

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charlieyu1 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Chinese history says otherwise. Nomadic tribes always get an upper hand despite disadvantage in numbers.